Today we will discuss six 2.5 HDDs with 160GB storage capacity, 5400rpm spindle rotation speed and SATA interface. These will be solutions from Fujitsu, Hitachi, Toshiba, Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital.

Conclusion

So, we’ve got six hard disk drives with different behavior. I’ll try to give you a brief description of each of them.

The Fujitsu MHW2160BH is a universal device. Featuring excellent sequential read and write speeds, it is the leader at multi-threaded reading. Coupled with good firmware algorithms, this makes it a stable leader at reading or copying large files. It has also been in the leading group through most of the tests.

The Hitachi HTS541616J9SA00 had the worst results in most of my tests. Firmware algorithms are very important for a HDD but this model was one of the earliest 2.5” HDDs with perpendicular recording technology and the developer had little time to polish its firmware off.

The Samsung HM160JI is a leader of this test session largely due to its high speed of processing small files – it has no rivals in this respect. By the way, this model shows that synthetic benchmarks can often be wrong about real capabilities of a HDD and it’s better to check it out in real-life tests as well.

The Seagate ST9160821AS is the first serially produced HDD of 2.5” form-factor with perpendicular recording technology. It is good at copying very large files (the ISO pattern in FC-Test) but otherwise slower than the other HDDs. It has a very low performance in the multi-threaded reading test, which is obviously inherited in its firmware from the 3.5” models.

The Toshiba MK1637GSX was somewhere in the last places throughout the tests but suddenly went ahead in PCMark and IOMeter Workstation.

The Western Digital WD1600BEVS is an average product that has average results in every test except at writing large files where it knows no rivals.

So, each HDD has its highs and lows, and you should choose one basing on the intended applications. For general purposes, the Samsung HM160JI and Fujitsu MHW2160BH should be a good choice.